Rays of the family Rhinopteridae Jordan & Evermann, 1896 are highly migratory and widely distributed in warm tropical and temperate waters. Along the Brazilian coast, the presence of two species has been recorded: Rhinoptera bonasus Mitchill, 1815 and Rhinoptera brasiliensis Müller, 1836. These stingrays are commonly caught as bycatch in trawl fisheries, however, the two species lack distinctive external morphological features...

Marine ecosystems are increasingly threatened by overfishing, pollution, coastal development and climate change, underscoring the need for long‐term, representative information on key fish populations and habitats to inform management and policy. Underwater fish observation (UFObs) techniques, such as Underwater Visual Census (UVC), stereo‐Baited Remote Underwater Video (stereo‐BRUV) and Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), play...

Multispecies coral reef fisheries are typically managed by local communities who often lack research and monitoring capacity, which prevents estimation of well‐defined sustainable reference points to perform locally relevant fishery assessments. Recent research modeling coral reef fisheries globally has estimated multispecies sustainable reference points (i.e., the maximum reef fish yields that can be harvested sustainably and...

Fluorometers are ubiquitous tools in the fields of oceanography, limnology, and water quality assessment. Fluorescent species in our waters range from in vivo chlorophyll, contaminants like crude oil, or intentionally added agents like rhodamine. Submersible in situ fluorometers can collect real-time data at scales that cannot be matched by discrete bottle samples with lab/​shore-side analysis. However, accessibility of sensor...

Atlantic mackerel or Amalamaq ( Scomber scombrus ) has been subject to diverse fishing pressures in Atlantic Canada for commercial, bait, recreational, and Indigenous food-social-ceremonial (FSC) fisheries, resulting in its substantial social and cultural significance in the region. Recent stock declines have led to closures of the commercial and bait mackerel fisheries, while recreational and FSC harvesters retain respectivel...

Alteration of benthic reef habitat after coral bleaching and mortality induces changes in fish assemblages, with implications for fisheries. Our understanding of climate impacts to coral reef fisheries is largely based on fish abundance and biomass. The rates at which biomass is produced and replenished (productivity and turnover) are also important to sustaining fisheries, yet the responses of these metrics following bleachin...

Ecologists often rely on observational data to understand causal relationships. Although observational causal inference methodologies exist, predictive techniques such as model selection based on information criterion (e.g. AIC) remains a common approach used to understand ecological relationships. However, predictive approaches are not appropriate for drawing causal conclusions. Here, we highlight the distinction between pred...

Wild‐caught fish are a bioavailable source of nutritious food that, if managed strategically, could enhance diet quality for billions of people. However, optimising nutrient production from the sea has not been a priority, hindering development of nutrition‐sensitive policies. With fisheries management increasingly effective at rebuilding stocks and regulating sustainable fishing, we can now begin to integrate nutritional outc...

In the face of increasing cumulative effects from human and natural disturbances, sustaining coral reefs will require a deeper understanding of the drivers of coral resilience in space and time. Here we develop a high‐resolution, spatially explicit model of coral dynamics on Australia's Great Barrier Reef (GBR). Our model accounts for biological, ecological and environmental processes, as well as spatial variation in water qua...

This data compilation synthesizes 36 static environmental and spatial variables, and temporally explicit modeled estimates of three major disturbances to coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef ( GBR ): (1) coral bleaching, (2) tropical cyclones, and (3) outbreaks of the coral‐eating crown‐of‐thorns starfish Acanthaster cf. solaris . Data are provided on a standardized grid (0.01° × 0.01° ~ 1 × 1 km) for reef locations along the...

Ocean warming under climate change threatens coral reefs directly, through fatal heat stress to corals and indirectly, by boosting the energy of cyclones that cause coral destruction and loss of associated organisms. Although cyclone frequency is unlikely to rise, cyclone intensity is predicted to increase globally, causing more frequent occurrences of the most destructive cyclones with potentially severe consequences for cora...

With marine biodiversity declining globally at accelerating rates, maximising the effectiveness of conservation has become a key goal for local, national and international regulators. Marine protected areas ( MPA s) have been widely advocated for conserving and managing marine biodiversity yet, despite extensive research, their benefits for conserving non‐target species and wider ecosystem functions remain unclear. Here, we de...

Measures of trophic position ( TP ) are critical for understanding food web interactions and human‐mediated ecosystem disturbance. Nitrogen stable isotopes (δ 15 N) provide a powerful tool to estimate TP but are limited by a pragmatic assumption that isotope discrimination is constant (change in δ 15 N between predator and prey, Δ 15 N = 3.4‰), resulting in an additive framework that omits known Δ 15 N variation. Through meta‐...

Coral reef fisheries support the livelihoods of millions of people but have been severely and negatively affected by anthropogenic activities. We conducted a systematic review of published data on the biomass of coral reef fishes to explore how the condition of reef fisheries is related to the density of local human populations, proximity of the reef to markets, and key environmental variables (including broad geomorphologic r...

Aim Quantifying and predicting change in large ecosystems is an important research objective for applied ecologists as human disturbance effects become increasingly evident at regional and global scales. However, studies used to make inferences about large‐scale change are frequently of uneven quality and few in number, having been undertaken to study local, rather than global, change. Our aim is to improve the quality of infe...

Coral reefs are highly complex ecological systems, where multiple processes interact across scales in space and time to create assemblages of exceptionally high biodiversity. Despite the increasing frequency of hierarchically structured sampling programs used in coral‐reef science, little progress has been made in quantifying the relative importance of processes operating across multiple scales. The vast majority of reef studi...